Little to hint at the foundation that his bailouts of Wall Street, Main Street and Motown would lay for a sustainable, if agonizingly slow, economic recovery after the worst downturn in 70 years. Or to signal that Obama would succeed where so many of his predecessors failed in honouring his campaign promise to bring about the greatest push for health care reform in a generation. Or that with his “Reach for the Top” program, rewarding excellence in K-12, Obama would put substance to his immediate predecessor’s disappointing if well-intentioned “Leave No Child Behind” initiative.

And that, in a first U.S. president’s speech to the Muslim world, a Cairo address in which Obama exhorted Muslims to cast off state suppression, Obama would help trigger an Arab Spring in which no fewer than three countries deposed entrenched dictators. And that Obama would be the president to finally make an end of the mass-murderer Osama bin Laden.

Indeed, one of Obama’s few memorable lines in an otherwise anodyne speech Jan. 20, 2009 was an assertion proved dubious by his first term. “On this day we gather because we have chosen hope over fear,” Obama said on the Capitol steps that day, [and] “unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”

But Americans had done nothing of the kind. Over the next four years, every major Obama initiative was met with acrimony and Tea Party angst, by partisan discord and relentless demonization of the president — indeed, a refusal to accept his legitimacy. Even Obama gives himself poor marks in failing to bring about a promised comity in Washington.

Obama has thankfully discarded the false hope of bipartisanship in pursuit of his second-term goals. But political analyst Jacob Weisberg of Slate, in identifying among these goals the primacy of protecting the federal safety net of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, muses that Obama might adopt a purely “reactionary liberalism.” That he could set a defensive agenda of simply preventing reactionaries from inflicting harm on America’s less fortunate — the 47 per cent written off by Mitt Romney.

If Obama is bent on greatness as a legacy, his second-term agenda will have to embrace not only gun control and immigration reform, the latter having enjoyed bipartisan support as recently as the early 2000s. It must also include substantive action on climate change — virtually a non-issue for the first-term Obama; a radical rethinking of income inequality, acknowledging the 30-year decline in American middle-class incomes; and some form of higher-education guarantee in the 21st century “knowledge economy.”

Obama has an impressive mandate, having last November become only the sixth president to win back-to-back victories with more than 50 per cent of the vote.

Admittedly, unfinished work from 2009-13 will define much of Obama’s efforts. Canada ranks third in the literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge of its workforce — America ranks 14th, trailing Estonia. Canada also spends less on health care for better health outcomes than our sole neighbour. And Canada is no paragon when benchmarked against still more enlightened European and Asian societies. If Obama and his fellow citizens have a vision for making the 2000s a second American century, they will fail with a population less smart and less healthy than America’s competitors.

Any second Obama term intended to have a lasting positive impact will count as its signature achievements “a path to citizenship” for America’s estimated 12 million undocumented, or illegal, immigrants. A return to genuine progressive taxation — one of humanity’s greatest inventions — whereby everyone, including the 1 per cent, pays their fair share of building the country. And a guarantee, inspired by the principles behind Obamacare, of higher education for everyone who seeks it.

Plainly, those initiatives are intertwined. They are the means by which a U.S. smarter, more culturally diverse and immigrant-friendly than most countries will thrive. The U.S. is blessed with a population forecast to increase by 40 million people by mid-century — a growth rate of which other Western countries can only dream. (The populations of Japan and Russia are already in decline; the rest of Europe, with its low birth rates, will soon follow.)

Typically — and Monday is no different — U.S. presidential inaugurations are moments for invoking platitudes. But behind the transitory pomp are Americans ready for progress, having rejected the party that tried to distinguish between “legitimate and illegitimate rape” and whose leader suggested that the remedy on immigration was “self-deportation” of “illegals.”

Given the enormity of the challenges ahead of him, we have to hope that Obama’s innocuous words of Monday’s inaugural speech will play out between now and 2016 in a renewed commitment to bold measures and stiffing a noisy minority of those still determined to take America back to the Dark Ages.

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